Bjarni: Terrain is sometimes known as ‘the third player’ in miniatures games, and for good reason. Most gamers will agree that two beautifully painted armies fighting across well-themed terrain is a fantastic sight.
With the abundance of modular terrain kits, it’s an absolute joy to create immersive battlefields for our games of Necromunda.
The current Zone Mortalis sets were released less than a year ago, and they’ve inspired so many people to build fantastic hive cities and slums for their gangs to fight across. I got my first Dark Uprising box as a Christmas present, and I started working on the underhive board I'd wanted to build for so long.
By including bits and pieces from almost the entire Warhammer 40,000 terrain range, I tried to create something unique, with a blend of modularity and playability that works for me and the group of people I play with.
Most of my upper floors have been designed in an L shape to make gaming easier between the floors. The L shapes also mean that turning any tile 90 degrees easily varies the board set-up.
To give my terrain a more authentic feel, I cut into some wall pieces, then I used plasticard and cardboard to construct shelves and alcoves which the gangers could stash items in – for example, I built a tool storage rack and a small shrine inside the walls. These areas can also be used for objectives during games, and they add some life to the corridors.
While the design of the new terrain is amazingly flexible, I wanted to do even more to show off the chaotic and haphazard nature of underhive construction. Searching through the terrain bits from my previous projects, I found that the height of Zone Mortalis columns is half of a Sector Mechanicus support strut, meaning that they fit together nicely.
I used a pair of support struts in place of columns and made a door opening with lots of valves and wiring built in. This allowed for more variation on the theme and added to the industrial feel of my sector.
I also used some leftover bulkhead doors from the 2017 Necromunda starter box – I converted them slightly with a bit of plasticard until they fit right underneath a column. I figured that, like anything else in the underhive, there’s going to be a huge diversity in the look of doors. To add to the variety further, I cut a window from a spare piece of clear plastic from an old blister pack.
Part of the vision I had for my board was to really build up the height, so my first four tiles can all be placed on top of each other, with stairs and elevators connecting the floors. This required some careful cutting of the tiles, to make room for staircases and elevator shafts.
Fortunately, the grooves between the floor pieces make it easy to cut as needed. I added railings around these holes, wherever possible, to conceal the cut areas.
The additional height meant a larger lift platform would be needed, one that could chug up and down the hive levels using its own power – so the “VertiMover Mk. VII” was created.
Made mostly from bits in the Galvanic Servohauler set, the idea of a promethium-powered elevator seemed very Warhammer 40,000 to me. It connects to the lift rails in the same way as the original platform, meaning that it can easily work on any of my tiles. The gangers in this sector travel in style!
I had some spare bits of Sector Imperialis floors from other projects, which I also included in my build. Unlike the mostly whole floor tiles of the Zone Mortalis sets, many of the Imperialis tiles are broken, giving a really worn down, dangerous look to some of my floor sections. I trimmed the tiles a couple of millimetres on each side to make them fit, once they’re painted the difference is barely noticeable.
A good trick here is to use the tiles that are in really bad condition since you won’t need to do as much cutting to make them fit.
To increase the modularity of my table, I ended up making one of my tiles as two halves, simply cutting a Zone Mortalis floor tile and building the set-up as two pieces. This allowed me to be more flexible with my board designs and gave me two smaller components, a stairwell and a fortified gate, to use as objectives or storytelling elements within games.
A final word of advice: when building, keep in mind that a lot of ideas may be right in front of you. The posters around this gate are scaled-down prints of the wanted posters made by the Warhammer Community team, and they’re weathered using Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil washes. Thanks for the inspiration, guys.
Thanks, Bjarni, for your inspiring look at how many different kits can be combined to create a complex underhive for your games. Spruce up your own battlefields with the wide array of terrain available on the webstore, including the Battlezone: Manufactorum – Conservators and Miniature of the Year 2016 runner up (yes, really!) Munitorum Armoured Containers.